There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well.

But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.

Chances are, you have seen one of those photocopied, five dollar zines about anything from local bands to organic gardening in your favorite magazine store. Florida based startup OpenZine is trying to take this idea of self-published amateur magazines to the web. In a world where blog publishing is ubiquitous and easy, however, what does OpenZine offer that couldn’t be done with a blog? While the idea of taking zines to the web sounds intriguing, superior publishing methods already exist for the web, and OpenZine, even though it has some interesting features, feels like a step backwards.

It’s a good day to be thinking about future scenarios for the media. In the wake of the latest global financial meltdown we are reminded that general economics will determine the health of the journalism business as much as markets in housing, food or cars.

Here at the DCMS Convergence Think-tank’s latest seminar everyone is suddenly a lot more interested in the scenario of low economic growth. If we enter a global recession then there is an obvious implication for media company profits but what about future infrastructure, editorial standards and public service?

It’s not all straight-forward. The context of rapid technologcal development in media means that conventional economics don’t always apply.

Newspaper Web sites, the theory goes, are the future of the industry. Sometime in the next few years, newspapers will make a transition to the Web, and the online business will pay the bills the print business once paid. Print will become the secondary product. A lot of us have been predicting this for years.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be quite working out that way. Seen the latest revenue numbers? Online newspaper revenue has stagnated, at best. Print revenue continues to tumble. The bridge to the future appears to be lengthening, if not crumbling. The lifeboat has sprung a leak.

And why? Well, frankly, a lot of it can be traced to a simple problem: Most newspaper Web sites just aren’t very good.

Lately, NYU journalism professor and Pressthink blogger Jay Rosen has been urging his Twitter followers (more than 1,600 of them) to point out examples of reporters “growing a spine” when it comes to pointing out and documenting untruths by the McCain presidential campaign.

Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine.

Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points.

In an IM interview today, Jay said:

“The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It’s hard for me to see how you can have a more legitimate or consensus practice in campaign journalism than fact-checking the empirical claims candidates make — in ads, speeches, interviews — as they compete for votes. In other words, if the press cannot at least do that, what is it good for?”

During ONA, Alfred Hermida took his N95 and asked around to the teachers present at the event about what they have to teach to grad journo students.

Robert Scoble, Rosental Alves – the professor at the Online Journalism workshop i attended last June (yes, i’ll keep on referring to it because it was really damn good)- and others leave their opinion about what journalism students need to learn and to be.

The advice for graduates was that they need journalism plus a new set of skills. The basics of journalism — curiosity, passion, accuracy, serving the public interest — were still important. But journalist students also need to learn about how the digital revolution has changed, and continues to change, the media.

This involves understanding how people are consuming media and how content flows online, as well as being aware of the importance of community and the conversation taking place online. Teaching journalism has become “journalism…plus” as Robert Scoble says below.